I've read citations in Marx's Capital that were part of a survey of laborers perceptions of and famailiarity with common christian ideas amd characters. And apparently some were considerable ignorant even confusing Satan and Christ apparently.
So, it got me thinking, before the age of mass comminications, were people as religious as we commonly perceive them to be?
The debate between the influence so-called 'high' and 'low' theology is an old one. Fortunately, it's also pretty much exactly what I study.
A couple of things:
First, we often confuse illiteracy with ignorance. As many have shown, an illiterate society could still very easily be a somewhat educated one. The idea of reading as a silent (or even private) act is a fairly new one.
Second, while we have a lot of stories of rustic superstition, there are also frequent and very clear-cut cases of peasants understanding canon law, particularly with respect to marriage rules. Moreover, particularly after Lateran IV in 1215, there was a concerted effort by the institutional Church to bring the laity up to a basic standard of knowledge. While not strictly caused by Lateran IV, the lay spirituality which existed from 1250 right up through the Reformation was one heavily influenced by a fairly impressive knowledge of so-called 'high' theology.
Third, the fact that the mass and the Bible were in Latin has never meant that vernacular translations did not exist.
The laity, particularly the laity during the later Middle Ages, had a solid grounding in the principle tenants of the faith. After all, it is a frequently-forgotten fact that the Reformation occurred not out of people throwing off the shackles of a burdensome religion, but as an expression of, among other things, individual religious fervor and a feeling of inadequacy with respect to the soteriological offerings of Church teachings.
If I had to put my finger on a moment in time during which the Christian laity was the least educated about their religion, there would be a couple candidates: the 7th c., the 18th c., and now. After all, how many of you can tell me something like how many natures were in Christ and in what quantity according to the precepts of your particular faith, a basic cachumenical question for millennia?
Reading:
French, Katherine L. The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval English Diocese. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
Vauchez, André. Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Amos, Thomas Leslie, Eugene Green, and Beverly Mayne Kienzle, eds. De Ore Domini: Preacher and Word in the Middle Ages. SMC 27. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. New York : Zone Books, 2011.
There's a text from 1286 called the Disuptation of Mallorca; in it is depicted a christian merchant--a middling merchant, not from a high family--debating the intricacies of the Christian faith with Jewish and Muslim merchants. Some historians think it's a recording of an actual debate.
Whether or not that's true, the existence of such a document at least suggests that an average guy should know some of the more 'deeper' points of his faith.
This would have been especially the case in the Mediterranean, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews existed (mostly peacefully) side-by-side in life and commerce. The presence of "the other" often induces one to know who they are, and why they are who they are.